


Bloodborne Pathogen (Cordyceps Horrorshow Remix)

by lantadyme



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe - No Sgrub Session, Cannibalism, F/M, Gore, Pale Romance | Moirallegiance, Vampires
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-07
Updated: 2013-02-07
Packaged: 2017-11-28 12:22:42
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,053
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/674352
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lantadyme/pseuds/lantadyme
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Being a rainbow drinker isn't quite the same as all her books described.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Bloodborne Pathogen (Cordyceps Horrorshow Remix)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Xelfi](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Xelfi/gifts).
  * Inspired by [Unusual Blood Abnormalities](https://archiveofourown.org/works/650024) by [Xelfi](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Xelfi/pseuds/Xelfi). 



She cannot remember anything—it fills her with a quiet, deep terror. She wakes contorted in the rank guts of a mass grave, the cadavers of others like her pressed in on all sides. She feels them against her flesh, slick with congealing blood and grime. Her skin glows, panic fluttering in her chest. She can't remember anything, even her name. Despite the glaring holes in her memory, she feels in her bones that this grave is a blessing. It is the only way she will survive.

She's starving in a way that has nothing to do with her stomach. She feels it in her limbs and the icy, tingling tips of her fingers, the corpselike tautness of her lips and her face. She feels pain in every inch of her body. She cannot remember anything and so she gives into her terrible instincts and presses her ravenous mouth to the wounds of the dead bodies closest to her, suckling for all the protein and nourishment her sad undead flesh needs like air.

 

Hours later she wakes again, still tangled in the mass grave. Everything stinks of rot and blood. Her face is matted with gore. She can taste it in the back of her throat, rank and putrid and sweet in a way that it shouldn't be. Her skin glows brighter with each panicked beat of her heart. Her stomach burns with agony worse than anything she has ever experienced before, but somewhere in her mind she finds an instinctual desire—an imperative need—to free herself from this gory prison no matter how much pain it causes her.

She's weak. Every movement aches. It's hard to breathe with so much weight on top of her, with so much pain spiking through her, with so much death in the air. She untangles her limbs slowly from the stiff limbs of her neighbors. Air. She needs clean air. She needs to be free. She needs to get out. She worms her way through the press of the dead, pushing against gravity toward the glimmers of blinding sunlight that spike through the blackness of the tangled corpses. She needs to get there. She needs the light on her skin.

It takes an eternity. She feels the pale green tears tracing down her face, melting into the cannibalistic gore smeared over her mouth. She wants nothing more than to give up, but that instinct in the back of her mind drives her up, drives her on. Her hand breaks through the surface. She feels the heat of the sun on her pale glowing skin, feels the hot teasing wind on her flesh, feels freedom so close she can almost taste it. And that is all the encouragement she needs to extricate herself from her prison.

She lies down flat on her back on top of the knot of corpses, staring upward at the terrible Alternian sun. She cannot stop smiling. She sucks down gallons of air. Every inch of her body hurts. She's still crying. The sunlight feels like the finest nourishment in all the world. She still remembers nothing—but a glimmer comes back to her: she always loved the sun even though it was death to the rest of her people. She falls asleep again, sprawled out in the sunshine with her hands folded over her chest.

 

Dusk startles her awake with the rumbling growl of a cholerbear. It crouches at the edge of the grave, a dead troll's head between its jaws. She shuffles backwards, skin glowing brighter than a startled seadweller's. The bear's eyes narrow, its nose snuffling at the air. But it has its breakfast already in its mouth and it isn't interested in chasing down a little undead girl.

She flees. She scuttles her way over the mound of corpses piled into this ditch. She can feel the heat of the desert to the west, the wind blowing strong and dry as baked bone. Her name is Kanaya Maryam and she is two miles outside of town. She lives in the desert. She trekked a night and a half into town to look at some fabrics for the new outfit she wanted to design. While she had been in the tailor's looking, the business district was sealed off by Imperial drones. A culling sweep. Anyone deemed sickly or unhealthy would be removed from the population at large to make room for a stronger, healthier crop of young ones. Kanaya had been healthy. She had been completely fine other than her recurring insomnia and her fascination with badly written occult romance literature. But as she stood at attention before the drone, body held straight and tensed, its optical sensors hadn't passed over her as they did time and time again when she would come into town and walk past the drones at the gateway into the desert. This time its eyes locked onto her, went a terrible shade of red, and in one fluid motion it had speared her through the stomach and left her to die.

It all floods back to her at once. She sits at the edge of the ditch full of bodies, eyes locked onto the feeding cholerbear and her arms wrapped tight around her knees. She is shaking from head to toe. She's afraid to press her fingers to her stomach to see how she has survived. Her flesh is cold to the touch, her blood sluggish in her ears. She feels stiff in every joint, slow in her head. And yet she feels stronger and sharper and meaner than she has ever felt in her life. She feels like she could run twenty miles without stopping. She feels like she could butcher this bear and eat its bleeding entrails with ease. And she has never dreamed of bathing in the blood of wildlife before.

Something's changed. Something is different about her. Her skin shines bright white in the burning orange glow of the sunset. The stink of rot and death doesn't repulse her. Three colors of blood are dried on her lips and somehow that fact doesn't turn her stomach.

Those badly written occult romance novels come to mind again, because she knows what this means. She'd spent many an hour daydreaming in a pile of fabric about glowing skin and the taste of blood.

Kanaya Maryam breathes in the hot desert air and struggles to believe:

She has become a rainbow drinker.

 

There's one thing she knows: she cannot go home. Alone in the middle of the desert, she will have no source of food. She's read book after book about rainbow drinkers gallivanting around the countryside and seducing trolls to their sides to love and to feed off of, but her first night as a creature of fiction she learns a hard truth: there is no glamour to being a rainbow drinker. The novels are all lies. She does not smell the scent of her Ideal Lover on the wind, nor does she have any sort of newly awakened psychic power that lets her feel the minds of the weak and bend them to loyalty. She is just Kanaya Maryam, recently dead, recently revived. She sits at the edge of the mass grave, watching animals come and go and feast on this offering of dead children. They watch her, nearly as wary as she is of them. She notices something about the corpses—all of them have been beheaded. As a desert native, she knows very well what that means.

The only sure way to prevent a corpse from reanimating into a zombie is through beheading. Her mind finally makes the connection. The Imperial drone culling sweep had been looking for children infected with zombie spores, had been assigned to cleanse the population. But Kanaya isn't a zombie. She isn't sprouting pseudo-leaves and flowering mushrooms all over her body. It seems she'd contracted something else, something the drone that dispatched her had been programmed to notice and to exterminate accordingly. But whatever causes one to become a rainbow drinker is apparently more tenacious than expected, because Kanaya Maryam is very much still aware and in control of her actions, though her flesh is cold and there is a gaping hole through her stomach.

She sits at the edge of the mass grave with the scavengers and the predators, and she eats. She is absolutely ravenous. The hole through her stomach leaks jade green. She should have long since exsanguinated but still she bleeds. The pain is intense but she can stand and walk and move, and when she presses two fingers into the wound, she encounters more than only slippery viscera and broken bone. Something like mycelium is growing inside of her, strong and crisscrossed to keep her organs from falling out, thick and woody to replace the support of her shattered spinal column. Something is putting her back together, something she recognizes as that new instinct in the back of her mind. Trolls infected with zombie spores develop an overwhelming need to walk out into the desert and die. Kanaya licks coagulated red blood off her palm and wonders if her new thirst for carnage is the only instinct she will develop, or if more terrible needs will take hold of her in time.

She thinks of Vriska. She thinks of Karkat. She wonders what she will do.

No trolls come from town to visit the mass grave. They're likely warded off by stories of terrible infection. The night waxes and wanes, the two moons shining bright. Kanaya eats all she can but she is overwhelmingly thirsty. The horizon finally burns with the red warning of day, and she gets slowly and shakily to her feet.

The town is desolate during the day, as spooky as any fabled ghost town. The drones hang silent and offline, like sleeping centurions still waiting at their posts. Every door is locked, every residential window closed tight and filmed over to keep out the blinding light. Kanaya slumps against the clear glass window of a store, pressing her nose to it and cupping her hands around her face to see inside. She smears two colors of blood on the glass but she sees what she's looking for inside: bottles of water stacked in the second aisle. The door is locked but she's read enough stories to know that a rainbow drinker has brute strength. She tears a gory strip off her tattered dress and wraps it around her hand twice before smashing the glass and stepping neatly inside.

She drinks four bottles dry before the thirst slackens. The tautness of the parasite growing in her belly loosens a little. Her body feels less likely to tear, less close to collapse. She twists open the cap on a fifth bottle and washes the blood off her face and her hands. She is still filthy from head to toe, but she feels slightly less monstrous. She tucks six more bottles into a plastic bag and leaves the store behind.

She can't go home. She can't stay here. She may be nothing more than a ticking time bomb, growing more dangerous and unhinged as the parasite grows within her. Kanaya is used to living alone; she is used to being 100% responsible for every aspect of her life. Suddenly she isn't sure how much she can trust her own instincts and responsibility anymore.

She stands in the middle of the street, the sun shining down hot on her hair and the back of her neck. The memory of bleeding out slowly resurfaces in her mind. The pain, the fear, the confusion. She hadn't wanted to die. She'd wanted to tell Vriska her true feelings. She'd wanted Karkat to keep her from lying about how she felt. She wanted to find someone to hate, someone entirely her own. Kanaya takes a deep breath of the hot day air and watches the black pool of her shadow, trying to grasp the tatters of her former life as they slip through her undead hands. The tears trace down her face again. The last person she'd thought of was Karkat. And she wraps her arms loosely around herself, feeling so small and scared and unsafe in this giant new world that she knows nothing about. She wants someone to hold her, someone to tell her it will be okay and that she won't be alone. She wants Karkat. And she sinks to her knees in the sunshine and cries quietly into her hands until she feels capable again.

She doesn't want to do this alone. If there's one thing she knows, it's that. And she doesn't know everything about Karkat, but she does know where he lives.

She has a goal. She clasps it to her heart like a precious thing.

Karkat. She will find Karkat. He's the only one she trusts with her unstable new brain chemistry. He will know what to do.

She breaks back into the tailor's shop. Her clothes are a wreck. She'll never blend in enough to go unnoticed if she's streaked with five colors of dried blood and smells of rot. She stands in the pool of sunshine flooding in through the shop window and strips down. She washes as well as she can in one bottle of water and then puts on new undergarments. The shirts and pants and skirts are all locked away, waiting for custom symbols embroidered in colors to match the client's blood. Instead Kanaya pulls a length of green fabric down from the tiny stash of colors in the shop. She cuts it, wraps it tight around her chest and belly to hide the gaping wound. Then she cuts another length and wraps it around her waist in a way she's familiar with from ancient fashion. She throws the loose end over her shoulder and smoothes out the wrinkles with her cold hands. Then she plucks her bag of water from near the door and leaves this town behind.

 

She takes the subway in the direction of his lawnring. She has to wait until nightfall to board it. She spends the day walking, drinking in the sunlight that somehow sates the terrible hunger she feels at night. She knows that zombies feed mainly on light, though they will take flesh if they can get it. Apparently rainbow drinkers are similar, but a living host still has enough willpower to remain nocturnal, hence the thirst for blood.

She drapes the loose end of her sari over her head to shield the pale glow of her skin. She boards the train with three others, bored looking trolls that barely glance her way as she lurks in the brightest patches of lamplight. She is bone tired but she has no chance to rest. The subway car is full of trolls going on their own journeys, many with lusii looped around their necks and weapons held ready in their hands for the first hint of strife.

Kanaya has never taken the subway before, but she's heard about the dangers from Vriska and Terezi and from Karkat. Each train is a tiny hivestem of its own, with residents and salesmen and tourists and all the potent danger of canning trolls up elbow to elbow in little shells of steel and giving them no reliable escape. The air smells of stress pheromones and old cooking oil. She sits near the door, near the light, and holds her lipstick in wary fingers. All she has in the world is her weapon, a few coins, some water, and the pieces of fabric she's wearing. She sits in the darkness in a train car moving at high speed through a tube underground, and she can smell the color of every person's blood within these sealed doors. It is the most enticing thing in the world, and terrifying to the core. She is insatiable. She knows without a doubt that she will not be able to hold back the hunger in a scuffle. The first pickpocket that tries something with her will get his neck torn out, and the whole car will have to watch her feed on her first living victim, weapons in their hands and ready to dispatch the monster in their midst.

She swallows hard. She refolds her hands again and again. The water sits in her lap, the bottles warm against her dead, cold flesh. In the light she doesn't appear to be glowing. She should look unassuming, boring—but she knows the wide, scared cast of her eyes will give her away to a subway native.

Vriska would know how to disguise herself. For a moment, Kanaya aches to see Vriska again.

People pass by, skipping from car to car. A child two sweeps younger than her tries to sell Kanaya a roasted grub, but she shakes her head, refusing. The cooked flesh smells lovely but she doesn't have much of a stomach left. She'd felt it in tatters. The ache in her belly is still there, but it's nowhere near as bad as it had been when she'd first pulled herself from the grave. She's not sure what she can eat besides blood now. She doesn't trust herself to experiment without someone to hold her back. She needs somewhere safe first. She needs Karkat.

 

Days pass down in the darkness of the tunnels as she transfers from line to line, slowly making her way around the equator of the planet. No hint of nourishing sunlight touches her skin, warm and bright to sustain her. Instead her hunger grows worse, the thirst for blood more pressing. Her mouth waters, the taste of the air and all the people around her clinging thick to the back of her throat like a curse. She is hungry. Her wrist shakes as she presses one hand over the hidden hole in her belly, trying to distract the hunger with spikes of pain. But it doesn't hurt like it used to anymore. The ache is duller, her flesh has less give. The parasite inside of her has healed most of her wounds—and now she feels its demands for compensation. It wants blood. It needs blood. It will make her take blood if it has to. And Kanaya knows it is only a matter of time before she loses control of herself and can no longer fight its impulses. What scares her more than anything is the thought of her autonomy being taken away.

She drains another stolen bottle of water dry.

 

Karkat's suburb is still and mostly quiet, the lawnrings parched and the hives' windows still glazed over to keep out the blazing afternoon sun. Kanaya smells blood on the wind, the kill of some lusus being dragged to a waiting child's house for a feast. She's walked two miles in the waning sun and still she feels less like herself with every step. She feels light-headed and weak, hungry deep down. The new instinct in the back of her mind tells her to feed— _feed_ —and she struggles with all her will to tamp it down. She fights to remain in control.

But it is not meant to be. A lusus appears before her, a crepuscular thing with venomous snake teeth and small eyes compensated for by gaping rabbit ears. It hisses death, angry to have a strange monster lurking around its home during its most active time of the day. She is so hungry. She smells blood on its breath, feels saliva drip down her canines as her mouth falls open. The lusus lunges, all claws and deadly fangs. Kanaya loses herself for a moment, comes back only because of the roar of her chainsaw in the air, the chain drive catching and tearing into the animal's ribcage. It screams like nothing she's ever heard. She's lost her bottles of water. She's lost control of herself. Her arms are bright orange from the elbow down, her hands cupping up the still-foaming blood and bringing it to her ravenous mouth. Her sari is splashed with marigold. The lusus still screams, paralyzed, as she slumps against its side and feeds the mycelium that has threaded itself through her flesh and her every thought.

A troll child screams. Before she realizes what she's doing, Kanaya turns, covered in orange gore. Her hands find her lipstick, twist it out into the screaming chainsaw best adapted for killing something like her instead of anything purely meat and bone. She shortens the child by a head and laps at the gushing arterial spray.

More trolls peek from their hives, risking sunburn to catch a glimpse of whatever massacre is happening in their neighborhood. Kanaya hears rifles cock, hears cries of disbelief and disgust and fear. She loses herself again. She doesn't know how many she kills. She doesn't remember how she got the gunshot wound in her chest that already the parasite is working to close. She doesn't know where she's going, just that she is feeding and she is powerful and she can destroy anything in the world, anyone, no one is a match for her otherworldly power.

But then she sees him. She sees his face in the lightened window of a hive. Karkat. And suddenly she snaps to a stop, her hands shaking and coated in gore as she drops the greenblood whose throat she has just torn out.

Karkat. That's who she came here to see. Karkat.

"Help me," she says, her voice barely a whisper. "Stop me."

He's too far away to hear her. She realizes it, moves forward and races up to his hive. She's so close to her goal. Karkat's right there. He can help her. And before she knows what she's doing, she's climbing up the side of his hive, leaving multicolored handprints in her wake. She smashes his window to shards and stands there in the aftermath panting, trying to catch her breath, trying to still her head. Trying to gain back control that the hormone rush of the parasite had thrown to the winds.

He's so much smaller than she'd expected. She'd imagined him taller, imagined him with his room more put together and less exhaustion in his face. He's nicked all over by the shards of glass from his window, and Kanaya's halting breath catches in her throat as she sees the color of his blood.

"Karkat," she says, the word so hard to get out around the feeding frenzy still working its way through her mind. "I found you." She wants to wrap her arms around him. She wants to tear him to shreds. "Red. So red. I always liked red, Karkat." She wants to drain that unnatural, freakish, delicious color out of him.

He should be horrified. Instead she sees something else in his eyes. "Kanaya?"

She loves that voice. It goes through her like a lightning rod.

She lurches forward, not sure what she'll do, just sure that she needs to get to him, needs to touch him, needs him to make the world stop spinning for her. "Please. Stop me."

He comes to her. There's none of the fear of the trolls she'd killed outside, none of the hesitance. He wraps her up in his arms, puts his hands on her face and whispers calming noises in her ear. His skin is fever hot to her dead flesh, a difference so absolute that she clings to it like an anchor. He smells like red red blood. He smells alive. He smells like safety and peace. And for the first time in her second life, Kanaya realizes that she has met someone who she doesn't think of as prey.

Karkat's not prey. She loves him unconditionally for that.

She loses herself in a different way this time. Her knees go out, the glass cutting into her skin. Her breath comes in hitches. She cries into the hollow of Karkat's neck, the most vulnerable part of him, and she feels no desire to sink her fangs into his flesh. She clings to him.

"I missed you so much," he says, pink tears in his eyes. "I'll do whatever you need."

"Thank you." Kanaya breathes heavily against his throat, a sob held back tight in her chest. She leans against him, throwing all her trust in his hands. "I missed you too."


End file.
